Power Plan Switcher

Power Plan Switcher is a free, open-source and feather-light application specifically designed for Windows 7 and Vista, which gives you the possibility to seamlessly toggle notebook power plans.It runs in the systray and doesn't integrate advanced configuration settings, making it accessible not only to experienced users, but also those new to this type of software.

No setup required, besides .NET Framework

The entire program's packed in a single .exe file that can be saved to a preferred directory on the disk or copied to a removable storage unit, in order to directly run it on any PC with little effort. It doesn't update your system registry with new entries or create files on the disk without asking for permission.In order to get rid of Power Plan Switcher, you just have to delete its executable. On the other hand, you must have .NET Framework installed, since it was developed with the aid of this platform.Once launched, the application gets integrated into the taskbar notifications area to facilitate quick access to its options while enabling you to carry on with your normal PC activity without balloon messages, popup alerts, or similar interruptions.

Seamlessly toggle notebook power plans

Left-clicking on the tray icon doesn't trigger any action. Instead, you can right-click it to bring up a small icon and select one of the power plans between "High performance", "Balanced" and "Power saver".These are accompanied by color-coded circles, whose purpose is to help you spot the power plan by just taking a look at the systray: red for "High performance" (to indicate the toll taken by this power plan on the notebook's performance), yellow for "Balance" and green for "Power saver".Unfortunately, Power Plan Switcher doesn't implement options for tweaking with the actual power plan settings. Instead, it only provides a shortcut for cycling through them. Therefore, it's necessary to use the built-in Windows features or another application for resolving this issue.

Evaluation and conclusion

Unsurprisingly from such a compact application, it had minimal impact on the computer's performance, thanks to the fact that it needed a low amount of CPU and RAM to work properly. We haven't encountered any stability issues, as it didn't freeze, crash or prompt errors.To sum it up, Power Plan Switcher may not have customization preferences for the power plans, but it delivers a straightforward solution for picking a preferred one from the system tray.